It starts with
the bus ride. Efficient, secure, prison-model, government-owned buses criss-cross
the state almost daily, delivering inmates as if they were steel beams
or timber. North and south along Highway 99 and Interstate 5, the asphalt
ribbons that bisect the Central Valley; east and west along Interstates
8 and 10, through parched deserts and gray scrub land near the Mexican
border, the traffic in inmates mingles with the other commerce of the state.serts
and gray scrub land near the Mexican border, the traffic in inmates mingles
with the other commerce of the state. of state prisons, as much a feature
of the modern landscape of California as beaches or Hollywood. Moved from
county jails to one of several "reception centers" to a final
destination after they are properly categorized, the inmates are held within
a system that struggles to cope with their numbers even as our politicians
cater to a public mood of anger and revenge.

From the gold
rush to the movies, California has always done things on a grand scale.
For most of this century, public works projects pointed the way to a boundless
future. Beginning in the 1930s, federal and state efforts built the most
ambitious water delivery system ever imagined, linking Northern California
to the Los Angeles basin and bringing desert land to life. After World
War II, the state put its energy into its public university system, making
it a preeminent center of academic achievement and offering near-limitless
opportunity for eager, qualified students. And in the second half of the
century, the freeways mushroomed at a time when America's view of itself
was defined by horsepower, high-test gasoline, and the open road stretching
to a bright horizon.

But today, farmers,
city dwellers, and environmentalists fight over the purity and ownership
of the water. State support for higher education has decreased, and the
university system, while it still earns high marks for graduate programs,
garners more headlines for fiscal scandals, golden parachutes for administrators,
and volatile disputes over affirmative action. And our most vivid images
of freeways now? Snarls of traffic, with brake lights blotting out the
horizon, or bridges washed out by winter rains, victims of neglect, decay,
or outmoded technology.

There is one
last great project that has not fallen on hard times, however: the California
state prison system. A source of livelihood for rural communities diminished
by recession and a source of juice for politicians selling a get-tough
attitude to a worried public, the prison system has flourished over the
past decade; it now ranks as the third largest penal system in the world,
after those of China and the United States as a whole. In 1983, there were
about 35,000 inmates in California prisons. Today, there are close to 135,000--one-third
are white, one-third black, and one-third Hispanic--in thirty-one prisons.
Over that same period, the state built twenty new prisons at a cost of
$3.5 billion. While other items in the budget froze or shrank, the Department
of Corrections grew from a $400 million bureau in 1983 to a multibillion-dollar
behemoth with 37,000 employees in 1995-1996. By the year 2000, due to "Three
Strikes, You're Out" legislation, California will have an estimated
210,000 inmates, an increase of 60 percent in just five years.

Drive the concrete
spine of the state, and you can get a sense of the scope of this public
enterprise. On the four-hundred-mile stretch between Sacramento and Los
Angeles, you are never more than forty minutes away from a state prison--Folsom,
Vacaville, Mule Creek, Stockton, Tracy, Chowchilla, Coalinga, Avenal, Corcoran,
Delano, Wasco, Tehachapi, Lancaster. Marked only by discreet signs that
point the way to what looks like a factory or a bleak high school surrounded
by razor wire, an electric fence, and guard towers, the prison industry
has outstripped agriculture in parts of rural California.

"That's
where a big, big chunk of California's budget is going, an increasing amount,"
says former state Senator Robert Presley, the once-powerful Democrat who,
as much as any one person, pushed the prison agenda during his years in
the legislature. Presley authored the first mandatory sentencing bill in
1978 and carried every bill offered in the Senate for prison construction
until his retirement in 1994. "We're at the point now where it's about
three and a half billion a year just to operate. It is like our Pentagon."

What happens
when a state that once set its sights on providing water, education, and
transportation for its citizens makes incarceration its top priority? This
special report will go inside California's fastest-growing industry.

The Population
Explosion

Four days a week,
with the smell of diesel exhaust, the hot whoosh of air brakes, and the
solid release of the door, a load of new prisoners is discharged at R.J.
Donovan Correctional Facility in San Diego County. Like other reception
centers throughout the state, Donovan, a medium-security prison built on
a rocky hill within sight of the Mexican border, is where inmates begin--or
resume--their life behind bars. Led off the bus in shackles, they pass
the sign that says "No Warning Shots Are Fired In This Area"
and proceed down a wire-mesh gateway toward their temporary quarters. Here
they await classification within the system.

The reception
area offices occupy temporary trailers due to chronic overcrowding at the
prison. On the day I visit, a small cadre of clerks are bent to their tasks.
Piles of inmate classification folders are stacked on desks, and metal
shelves in a hallway groan under the weight of still more folders. Records
clerk Yvonne Vizcarra walks me through the process: an "abstract of
judgment" comes with each prisoner, explaining what he or she did
to get locked up. A "body receipt" is filed for each arrival,
and the inmate gets a prison number. Vizcarra's job is to enter the information
into the computer database--the Offender Based Information System--that
records each inmate's movements through the correctional system.

Take William
S., for example. Vizcarra explains that the forty-three-year-old is coming
into the system as an RTC with a WNT. Meaning, he is a parole violator--Return
to Custody--who did something else--With a New Term--to earn his trip back
to the joint. "Some of the lifers have been here so long, they have
several boxes full of files," says one of the guards.

The one thing
that governs the classification process is points. The more points a prisoner
gets, the higher his custody level (I-IV) and the more restrictive his
environment will be. A prisoner gets points for being below age 26 (2 points),
not completing high school (2 points), being unmarried (2 points), not
having been in the military (2 points), and having prior offenses (up to
12 points). A prisoner also gets points equal to the number of years of
his sentence multiplied by three. The points are added up and the total
corresponds to a security level: 52 points and above gets you Level IV,
maximum security. (Increasing numbers of three-strikes convicts will end
up in Level IV, mostly because they face such long sentences. "It's
going to be a different prison system to operate when all of a sudden a
significant majority of the people have twenty-five years to life,"
says James Gomez, director of the California Department of Corrections.
"As you take away hope, you have a different management problem.")

The last stop
for the new inmate is a ten-minute psychological screening. If everything
is okay, he is sent on. If not, he may get a more serious evaluation. "In
many cases," the screening doctor at Donovan assured me, "we
can fix their problems."

Actually, the
system isn't about fixing problems. The system is about punishment, a change
that was made official in 1978, when the legislature rewrote the penal
code to state that the purpose of corrections is punishment, not rehabilitation.
At about the same time, the legislature also acted to remove discretionary
sentencing power from judges. That move, a change from the old system of
indeterminate sentences to the current one of determinate sentences, as
much as anything else, paved the way for the expansion of the California
prison system.

Ironically, it
was liberal criticism that initiated the changes in sentencing structure.
Under the old system, a felon was often given a sentence of seven years
to life, and it would be up to the parole board to determine when the inmate
might be given a parole date. If an inmate was judged to have been rehabilitated,
or at least to have had a clean record in prison, he could find himself
back on the street in a relatively short time. But liberal opponents of
that system charged that the deck was stacked against prisoners because
the parole board could keep someone inside indefinitely.

Once that first
change was made in sentencing, the legislature was off and running. Since
then, more than 1100 bills have passed through the California legislature
mandating increased sentences for crimes ranging from drunk driving to
drive-by shootings. Three strikes is the most sweeping of the changes,
but it is the logical extension of a system run by politicians trading
on public fear.

"We understand
that the promises we are making by this bill cannot be fulfilled,"
Assemblyman Phil Isenberg (D-Sacramento) told his colleagues during the
debate over three strikes. "But we so fear the voters that we are
hesitant to talk honestly and publicly about the questions of crime and
punishment." Isenberg, whose father worked in corrections and who
lived at San Quentin, cast one of only eighteen votes against three strikes
in 1994. The vast majority of politicians of both parties mouth the rhetoric
of Governor Pete Wilson, who kicked off his short-lived presidential campaign
by saying, "As president, I'll appoint judges who know that it's better
to have thugs overcrowding our jails than overcrowding your neighborhood."

Prisons Within
Prisons

The most unexpected--and
perhaps most unsettling--thing about our massive prison superstructure
is the quiet. In joint after joint, the volume is turned way down. Secured
by lethal 4000-volt, 650-milliampere electric fences, populated by inmates
kept firmly in check by no-nonsense guards backed by modern technology,
and built miles away from major cities, these tributes to the mean spirit
of the new California are virtually stone silent.

California State
Prison at Corcoran, located fifty miles south of Fresno and about thirty
miles from I-5 on the floor of the Central Valley, is typical of the new
breed--orderly, low-slung, and uniformly industrial-block gray, with hardly
a grain of sand out of place. On a recent clear summer morning, Lieutenant
Pat De Ochoa, the prison's press officer, led me through one chain-link,
razor-wire-crowned gate after another, past a glassed-in observation booth
and a metal detector, and into one of the state's toughest maximum-security
prisons. The crunch of our shoes on gravel was the only sound.

Inside, we entered
C Yard, one of three yards in the Level III section of Corcoran. Shared
by more than one thousand long-term convicts housed in five units, the
yard was full but quiet and unrelentingly grilled by the sun. In one area,
some prisoners played basketball while others lifted weights. Small groups
of inmates--always strictly self-segregated by race--walked in circles
around the yard, three or four abreast, or stood silently against a wall
killing time. No one smiled. Above it all, guards chosen for their sharpshooting
and armed with Heckler &amp; Koch 9mm rifles watched intently from
glass-and-steel gun turrets, ready to fire should any inmate attack another
inmate or staff member. Their presence is no idle threat. California guards
have killed thirty-eight inmates in the past decade, three times as many
as in all other USprisons, state and federal, combined.

Corcoran was
not much different from other modern California prisons I toured on tightly
controlled visits to the bold new world of penology. Savvy correctional
officers well schooled in handling the press speak of getting prisoners
to "program" successfully, and of inmate "feeding"
schedules. As different from the "big house" of movie lore as
a suburban community is from downtown San Francisco, these warehouses for
society's castoffs and miscreants are efficient, relatively safe, sanitized
repositories of despair.

That there are
bad people in prison goes without saying. That there are only irredeemably
bad people in prison is open to question. The closure of public mental-health
facilities over the past two decades, the deterioration of community services,
and the public mood against crime have all contributed to the swelling
prison population--a fact even the CDC's Gomez will grant. "Problems
with substance abuse, mental health, homelessness--we get them all,"
says Gomez. "We are a receptacle for all these issues. . . . We are
a full-service department."

Each year the
CDC's operating expenses take a bigger bite out of the state budget. But
for two years, the legislature has failed to appropriate money for new
prison construction, and that threatens a crisis. Our new laws demand longer
sentences and more punishment, but the system is reaching its limits. "The
legislature is going to have to get behind either alternative sentencing
programs or more prison building, and it is doing neither," said Geoff
Long of the Assembly Budget Committee after the 1995 legislative session
ended with no action on a measure requesting $1.6 billion in construction
bonds.

"This is
the same legislature that voted almost unanimously for three strikes to
make the numbers grow to 210,000," said Gomez. "But to the extent
that no more prisons are built, the federal courts will eventually mandate
a reduction [to ease overcrowding]." Privately, an aide to Gomez fumed
over legislative inaction, saying that Governor Wilson had failed to lobby
on behalf of the prison system. "He hasn't done anything," said
the aide. "When the system breaks down, he won't be in office anymore,
and the department will get the blame."

Overcrowded or
not, prisons are meant to be dreary. But for those prisoners deemed truly
bad by the system--inmates who assault each other or staff, who traffic
in drugs or commit other offenses inside the walls--there are worse places.
There are the prisons within prisons known as Security Housing Units. Inmates
call them "the Hole." California maintains two: one at Corcoran,
the other at Pelican Bay State Prison near the Oregon border.

Each of the three
SHU buildings at Corcoran is divided into three sections with twenty cells
and forty men on each side--in the SHU, as in the rest of the system, double-celling
is the rule. Inside A section, there is no activity. Occasionally I catch
the movement of a shadow behind a cell door. In the guard office, three
correctional officers sort paperwork and fill out forms. Next to them,
plastic safety razors hang on a wall, to be checked out three times a week
to the prisoners. Upstairs, in the control room, an armed guard has a commanding
view of the cell block. He also has completely open firing lines through
a grate in the floor.

Three times a
week, for a total of nine hours, prisoners are taken out of their cells
to the SHU yard. They are stripped down to their shorts, searched, and
chained together before passing through two barred doors and walking the
dozen steps to a heavy steel door that leads to the yard.

The yard is actually
an irregular slice of gray cement walled off within the building. It is
perhaps sixty feet long, narrowing from forty-five feet wide at one end
to fifteen feet wide at the other, and is technically outside in that it
has no roof. It contains a stainless-steel toilet at the far end of the
wedge and a chessboard painted on the concrete floor. Once they're unshackled,
the prisoners can walk, sit, or talk, or play chess with pieces drawn on
paper. There are no regulation chess pieces, nothing that might become
a weapon. All yard activity is videotaped by a wall-mounted camera. The
walls are about ten feet high with loops of razor wire at the top. There
is no view of the outside world, just the sky above. "It's okay here,"
says the officer on duty. "We respect them and they respect us."
Is it hard time? I ask. "Yes and no," he says. "They get
fed three times a day."

Back in the guard
office, I notice a roster of prison ID cards matched to a grid of the cell
block depicted on the wall. Grim-faced inmates, surprisingly young, stare
out from the ID pictures, like chessmen who never move from their squares.

I ask a pair
of convicted murderers who have both done long stretches in the SHU what
the experience was like. Marvin M., thirty-nine, who has been in and out
of prison most of his life, says, "People get more violent in the
holes, because of the isolation. It's really a test." Dwight D., a
twenty-nine-year-old doing seventeen to life for a murder he committed
when he was about to go to college, adds, "You're either going to
adjust or you're going to fold. Those that adjust, come on out. You just
do whatever you have to do."

Earning a term
in the SHU might begin with getting tripped up by Sergeant D.E. Martin,
a steely-eyed cop who runs the security squad at R.J. Donovan. Martin keeps
an eye on gang activity, investigates crimes in the prison, and searches
for contraband. The weapons he has confiscated show considerable ingenuity.
One features a razor blade half-embedded into the melted handle of a toothbrush,
perfect for slashing a cheek or an arm. There's a soda can fashioned into
a knife, and a three-foot-long spear crafted from layer after layer of
moistened paper, sharp enough to do considerable damage if wielded skillfully
by someone with sufficient rage. Another knife is made from Styrofoam that's
been melted, shaped, and rehardened. "In here it's like trying to
police cavemen," says Martin. "They can make something out of
nothing. There are always weapons out there."

A Sense of
Security

It's hot, dusty,
and miserable in Calipatria, a maximum security prison within sniffing
distance of the Salton Sea. The still, parched air is filled with the aroma
of livestock and chemicals from Imperial Valley farms. Calipatria, like
most state prisons, operates at about 180 percent of designed capacity,
which means that the vast majority of prisoners spend their days double-celled
in a six-by-ten-foot enclosure designed for just one man. The prison has
a reputation as one of the most violent in the system. Almost all of its
inmates are classified Level IV. What's worse, 68 percent of the inmates
have no prison job to keep them occupied because their high-security status
makes it difficult to find suitable work for them.

"Everyone
out here is a predator--every one of them," says my guide, Lieutenant
F.R. Dymond, as we walk through the maximum security yard. "Now, where
they're at on the food chain is another matter," he adds. Dymond has
been in prison service for more than twenty-two years and has been stationed
at Calipatria since September 1993. He says that most guards don't even
want to know what an inmate is in for, because it gets in the way of dealing
with him fairly. Dymond assumes the worst, he says, and waits to be proven
wrong. "You have to look at these guys as the same once they are in
here. It's the job."

On May 5 this
year, the job turned violent. Five inmates, all of them gang members from
South Central Los Angeles, broke into a program office at Calipatria and
attacked a guard. Before the melee was over, seven guards had been injured,
the most staff injuries from a single incident in a California prison in
a decade. The attack raised fears that the bill may be coming due for a
decade of serious overcrowding, despite the boom in construction. "We
get a lot of young, violent offenders here. They can be pretty volatile,"
Calipatria security head Lieutenant John Peck told me during my visit.

A CDC study of
prison unrest nationwide, conducted before the passage of three strikes,
raised concerns that overcrowding, inmate idleness, and inexperienced personnel
could lead to disturbances in California's system. "We need to lock
up some of these guys who are terrorizing the citizens," says Warden
John Ratelle at R.J. Donovan. "But we can't just cram more into the
same institutions, because we're going to create more and more problems."

Greater overcrowding
is where we're headed, however. The Legislative Analyst's Office projects
that in order to accommodate the increase in inmate population over the
next five years without any new construction, the prison system will have
to operate at about 256 percent of capacity.

Combine that
with new restrictions being placed on prison weight lifting and other so-called
frills, and it could mean that a lot of tough, young cons at Calipatria
will find themselves spending years doing almost nothing. It's a prospect
that does not thrill Lieutenant Dymond. "They need to have something
to do," he says.

The prisoners
themselves see the futility of a system that increasingly offers incarceration
without opportunity. "I was given seventeen to life," Dwight
D. told me at Corcoran. "Say they keep me in here twenty-five years.
If you don't release me with an education, a skill, something I can be
beneficial to the community with, then I'm right back where I was twenty-five
years before I left. You got a guy that's been down twenty years, he gets
out, forty-five years old, and he's a mechanic. `Okay, you're a mechanic.
Can you work on this computer chip that's failed in this car?' `Well, no,
but I can change your oil.' `Sorry, Mr. Jones, we don't need you.' So he's
back in society, and pretty soon he'll turn to crime. And then society
holds him up as an example of why we should be tough on crime, and nobody
has benefited."

To be fair, most
moves to do away with prison "frills"--including new restrictions
on overnight family visits proposed recently by the department--do not
start with the Department of Corrections but are rather the result of mandates
from the legislature, a fact that causes concern among some experts. "Micromanaging
the system for political ends leads the system into jeopardy." says
Geoff Long, an analyst for the Assembly Budget Committee. "Stripping
incentives away from inmates can put us in a very dangerous spot."

Getting tough
on crime is what the public seems to want, however, and turning the complex
issue of crime and prisons into simple slogans has proved to be a successful
strategy for those who sell the agenda to the voters: No Frills. Truth
in Sentencing. Three Strikes, You're Out. "Simple is nice," says
prison critic Vincent Schiraldi, executive director of the Center on Juvenile
and Criminal Justice. "Three strikes was beautiful that way. It sounds
so simple."

The theory is
that by locking up more lawbreakers, we ought to be making ourselves safer.
But a report from the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst's Office tracking
crime trends in California says that the crime rate peaked in about 1980,
before the massive prison building boom, and has remained relatively flat
ever since. Three-strikes advocates point to lower rates of some crimes,
but a recently released study by UC Berkeley Law Professor Franklin Zimring,
which tracked the effect that prisons have on crime in California, found
no evidence that violent crimes (the crimes the public says it most fears)
were affected by locking up offenders in greater numbers. "Not one
credible person says that this is working," notes analyst Geoff Long.
"The only ones who say it works are the political types. Unfortunately,
the system is being run by political hacks, not by correctional professionals."

Men of Influence

"California
is simply catching up to about twenty years of neglect in terms of the
prison system," says Jeff Thompson. Thompson is the chief lobbyist
for

one very vocal
group that insists the system is working: the California Correctional Peace
Officers Association. The union of prison guards has exploded right along
with the inmate population and has become perhaps the most politically
powerful union in the state. "From 1963 to 1984, California's population
boom years, not a single new prison was opened, not a single new bed added
to the system. So I really can't say that we're doing any more than we
should," Thompson continues. "I think the key doctrine is that
for the first time the criminal element has been put on notice that they
are going to be held accountable for their lifestyle."

Headed by Don
Novey, a savvy former Folsom Prison guard who took the reins in 1980, the
CCPOA has grown tenfold in fifteen years to about 23,000 dues-paying members.
A corrections officer need only be a high school graduate and attend a
six-week training academy. In recent years, salaries have risen 27 percent;
a senior officer with seven years' experience will earn around $44,0